My company is currently deciding on an Email upgrade. We currently have a vanilla Postfix install that sits behind a Barracuda Firewall. Yes it provides our email and webmail, but it doesn't include all the tools and features we need to truly work efficiently. We use different calendars, email clients, webmail clients, and access protocols to get things done, but it seems everyone's converting docs, forwarding and requesting access all for simple correspondence and communication. It's a mess! Our I.T. Department has been pushing for Google Apps instead of doing everything in-house. This was hard at first to win over management due to costs. So we had to prove that the features would outweigh the costs and provide enough efficiency to offset those costs. We first started with the cost of Email Solutions and then compared the features. A lot of Google Apps features are seen in an Exchange Options, but only a handful, and compared to the price, Google Apps wins. Especially if Wave is eventually included! We could have opted for a QMail or Sendmail option but we would still be lacking in calendar and document collaboration. Here is a brief rundown of what we gathered.
Pricing:
Google Pricing
Annual cost $50 / user account / year
User maximum unlimited
Google Features:
Messaging apps: Gmail and Google Calendar
Gmail storage 25 GB / account
Interoperability with Microsoft Outlook email and calendar
Sync with Blackberry Enterprise Server
Easy contacts management
Mobile email, calendar and IM access
Email security, powered by Postini
Gmail ads can be disabled
Resource scheduling in Google Calendar
Collaboration apps: Google Docs, Sites, Video and eventually Wave?
Google Sites storage 10 GB plus 500 MB per user for shared storage
Google Video for private, secure video sharing
Google Apps Script
Security Features
SSL enforcement for secure HTTPS access
Customizable spam filtering
Customize password strength requirements
Email routing and email gateway support
Migration and integration tools
Email migration tools and API
Directory sync with LDAP systems
Email routing and email gateway support
Single sign-on API
User and group provisioning API
Technical Support
24/7 phone and email support for critical issues
99.9% uptime guarantee SLA
Self-service online support
Migration Process:
Prune mailboxes on existing mail server.
Create Gmail mailboxes for all users.
Create distribution list to match current e-mail aliases.
Run Google migration tool to migrate ALL mailboxes that exists on current mail server to Gmail.
Update MX record to send e-mail to both existing mail server and to Gmail.
Migrate pilot group of users, work out any kinks with migration process, use this time to adjust configuration of Google Apps.
Migrate the rest of the users.
Change password of each user on existing mail server so they can't access the mail but it is still accumulating in mailbox. This is for backup purposes.
Once we are all using Google Apps and we are confident that everything is good we will change the MX record to just point to Google.
Additional information needed prior to migration:
Need to determine which protocol (pop3 or imap) everyone uses. This will dictate how we go about converting each person.
Need to know which e-mail client everyone is using:
The Gmail migration utility is for Outlook only.
For Outlook express we could migrate to Outlook and then run migration utility.
Users using pop3 and some other mail client will need to use drag and drop process to migrate.
Need to determine size of each mailbox of users using pop3 to help in estimating and scheduling migrations.
Notes:
Our original estimate for Google Apps was low as we did not factor in mailboxes used by our software for error reporting etc. We simply estimated the number of employees and based our number on that. We also needed to include an estimate including the error and alert emails. We need to do some sample conversions of users who are currently using pop3 to gain a better understanding of the length of time it will take to convert each users data.
Thoughts:
Google Apps for domains could really increase productivity and collaboration if all employees buy in and utilize the full feature set of the Google's web based products. In order to convert those that currently use MS products you should consider the possibility of training for Google Apps. If you are planning to use Google Apps simply for e-mail then you probably don't need training. From an IT perspective Google Apps should become the main tool that you use rather than becoming just another tool in your toolbox. This means for example that you convert your intranet sites from Sharepoint to Google Sites, use Google's Calendar, and be sure to take advantage of the label and filter system. It also makes sense to use Google Docs to replace the use of MS products there as well.
My company is currently deciding on an Email upgrade. We currently have a vanilla Postfix install that sits behind a Barracuda Firewall. Yes it provides our email and webmail, but it doesn't include all the tools and features we need to truly work efficiently. We use different calendars, email clients, webmail clients, and access protocols to get things done, but it seems everyone's converting docs, forwarding and requesting access all for simple correspondence and communication. It's a mess! Our I.T. Department has been pushing for Google Apps instead of doing everything in-house. This was hard at first to win over management due to costs. So we had to prove that the features would outweigh the costs and provide enough efficiency to offset those costs. We first started with the cost of Email Solutions and then compared the features. A lot of Google Apps features are seen in an Exchange Options, but only a handful, and compared to the price, Google Apps wins. Especially if Wave is eventually included! We could have opted for a QMail or Sendmail option but we would still be lacking in calendar and document collaboration. Here is a brief rundown of what we gathered.
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